Cairn Hound

Beside a waymarking cairn on the moor lies a great hound made of piled fell stones and moss, lichen for fur and pale light between the stones for eyes. The shepherds walk past it. Strangers who move the cairn find it standing.

The moor shepherds speak of it as of a dog that belongs to somebody else. Beside certain cairns on the high moor, among the heather, there is a heap of fell stones that a man coming close sees to be a hound lying down: a great head of stacked stone, moss and lichen over its back like a rough coat, forepaws of boulder, and two points of pale light set between the stones. It does not move when a shepherd passes. A shepherd's crook is sometimes left leaning on the cairn by it, and nobody takes it.

When it gets up, which the tales say it does in snow and in bad years, it stands higher than a horse and goes on four stone legs across the moor with no more noise than the wind. It keeps the cairns. A party of surveyors who took stones from one to build a trig point found the hound on the line the next morning, standing, and their own line wrong by a quarter of a mile. They did not find their chainman until the thaw. The shepherds hold that it belongs to the ridge power the Old Watch, as the wolves belong to the pale one.

It is a spirit's servant: a thing of the moor's own stone, set to keep the ground of the ridge's power. It can be broken, and the stones will lie there for a season before they are a hound again.

As witnesses describe it

A great hound of piled moorland stones and moss lying beside a tall waymarking cairn in the heather at sunset, pale light in its eyes, a shepherd's crook leaning on the cairn. In the other picture it stands on a snowy ridge in a storm, stone-bodied and frost-covered, faint blue light glowing between its stones.